FIFA’s World Cup Organizing Committee finalized the procedure for the draw set to take place on Friday. I hoped FIFA would put the United States and the other Concacaf teams in a pot with the Africans, but alas, we’re in with the Asians and New Zealand. That makes it much more likely that the US will be drawn into a tough group, needing to dodge some really tough teams in both the unseeded pots and missing out on playing any of the weaker teams in the tournament. While I was wrong about where FIFA would place the US, I was certainly right about FIFA shenanigans, even if it is wholly justified. Completely out of the blue, FIFA scrapped its complicated seeding formula that factors in World Cup performance and three years worth of world rankings, and simply went with the October (not most recent) world rankings to rank the seven teams that will join South Africa in the seeded pot. The only possible explanation to do this is to ensure that France miss out on a seed. We’ll break this down in a lot more detail later today and tomorrow in the run up to the draw.